I’m a co-founder of ITA Software (now Google Flights), and people often assume that we at ITA thought Sabre and predecessors like the one mentioned here were crap. On the contrary: I, at least, think they were among the greatest software achievements of their era.

What was less impressive was airlines still relying on the same code 40+ years later: the challenge we set for ourselves was to bring the power engendered by all those years of hardware improvement (and Linux boxes vs mainframes) to bear on the travel industry. And we did that successfully for fare search!

We then tried and failed to do the same for the much larger challenge of the reservation system (think airline operating system).

I distinctly remember philg (OP) visiting ITA’s crappy office in Kendall Square circa 1998, telling us we were all wasting our time trying to improve airline IT. In retrospect it’s “a cautionary tale” (quoting Phil’s post): knowledgeable people often overstate the advantages of the incumbents and underplay the value of luck and timing to startups.